Obama administration goes on offensive against Netanyahu

For weeks, the White House has taken a deliberate approach to dealing with the controversy over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heading to Congress to bash him: Step out of the way, and try to come out ahead.

One week out from the speech, the administration has changed tactics and gone on the offensive.

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Fresh off national security adviser Susan Rice telling Charlie Rose Tuesday that the partisanship of the speech is “is destructive of the fabric of the relationship,” another administration official chimed in.

Fights with Netanyahu have usually ended poorly for the administration, and for President Barack Obama himself, who has been portrayed as not being committed to Israel, dismissive of the prime minister, not a friend of American Jews. This showdown has developed differently, and this time it’s Netanyahu on the defensive. Anxious not to change that dynamic, the president and his aides have treaded carefully, ruling out a meeting with the prime minister, poking at him periodically, but noticeably not going hard after him directly.

Then came Wednesday: Testifying in front of Congress, Secretary of State John Kerry said Netanyahu wasn’t just uninformed about the Iran nuclear deal that’s in final negotiations now, but he’s been wrong every step of the way — including about the interim deal which temporarily froze the development of Tehran’s weapons program while talks continued.

“Israel is safer today with the added time we have given and the stoppage of the advances in the nuclear program than they were before we got that agreement, which, by the way, the prime minister opposed,” Kerry said. “He was wrong.”

But Kerry, who came into the State Department hoping to leverage his long relationship with Netanyahu into a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and has since swiped publicly at the prime minister several times, reached back even further.

“The prime minister was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush. We all know what happened with that decision,” Kerry said. Kerry didn’t mention, however, that he’d voted to authorize the invasion when he was in the Senate.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, White House press secretary Josh Earnest stood by Rice’s comments as “entirely consistent with what the President has already said.”

He deflected a question about whether Obama thinks Netanyahu should call off the speech, saying “Netanyahu needs to make these decisions for himself.”

Netanyahu may think that the speech is in Israel’s best interests, Earnest said, but Obama’s been clear: He doesn’t think meeting with the prime minister two weeks before Israeli elections is in America’s best interests. So Netanyahu can set his schedule, but “the president is also going to set his schedule.”